Police, mayor step up efforts to force New Orleans residents out

Officials step up efforts to force New Orleans residents out

NEW ORLEANS - If New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has his way, the only residents left in this devastated city in a few days will be those floating in the putrid water that covers most of it.

Nagin vowed to enforce an order that those residents who did not leave the city before Hurricane Katrina rendered it largely uninhabitable 10 days ago must do so immediately or face being evacuated by force.

There was no evidence Wednesday that any people had been forcefully taken out of the city, but it was clearly evident that the tens of thousands of police and military personnel on the streets had stepped up efforts to persuade people to leave voluntarily.

"At this point, we are still requesting people to leave. My understanding is it will be mandatory later," said one police officer who declined to be identified. "Things change on a day-to-day basis."

Floodwaters that had, at one point, covered nearly 80 percent of the city continued to slowly recede as water was pumped out of at least one badly inundated neighborhood. But nearly two-thirds of the city remained under an increasingly foul flood in which the bodies of the dead have been floating for more than a week.

It is not known how many victims were claimed by Katrina. But Nagin has repeatedly claimed that the death toll will be in the thousands, possibly as high as 10,000. At a mortuary set up in St. Gabriel, La., only a handful of refrigerated trucks arrived Wednesday, presumably with victims of the storm, but no one would confirm it.

Asked if authorities expected as many as 25,000 bodies, he said: "We don't know what to expect."

Nagin issued the order allowing authorities to use force to get residents out late Tuesday night, citing the dangerous combination of fires, natural gas leaks and polluted water.

On Wednesday, the first government tests confirmed fears about the floodwaters, showing that the levels of sewage-related bacteria in them is at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety levels.

Still, many residents, some in heavily hit areas and some in areas that received only minimal damage, said they would under no circumstances leave. Officials estimated that of the city's more than 484,000 residents, only about 10,000 remain.

But others would have been all too happy to evacuate, except they had not yet been reached by the rescue effort.

Charles Christmas, 53, of the Hollygrove neighbor of south New Orleans, waved a white towel at volunteer rescuers who managed to reach his house, still under water to the second floor windows.

"I haven't seen no living person since Sunday," he said Wednesday. "Nobody has been able to reach me here. I was thinking the water would come up and then go back down. Evidently I was thinking wrong."

Christmas said he has subsisted on cookies and hot sodas.

'I'm going to lock my door'

Throughout the city, it was far from clear how mandatory the evacuation had become. Active-military troops told
the Associated Press
they had no plans to use force, and
National Guard
officers said they do not take orders from the mayor. Even police officers seemed reluctant to use force just yet.

In the Uptown neighborhood, a group of New Orleans officers stopped a man walking in the street. He was frisked, questioned, then let go.

Near Magazine Street, on the edges of downtown, Steve Thomas, a 58-year-old Vietnam War veteran, sat on his porch listening to a small radio. A National Guard patrol had walked by moments earlier, chatted with him and, after hearing of his military past, moved on.

Thomas, whose house is unscathed, and who has ample food and water, a working phone and cigarettes to last a month, was adamant that he will not leave. "I'm going to lock my door," he said, tears running down his cheeks. "I got food. I got my telephone. My house is high and dry. So what you going to mess with me for?"

Annie Bell does not want to leave the city either, and has lived on a freeway bridge near the Superdome for the last five days. Other evacuees, she said, have already overflowed other cities and she doesn't want to be in a crowd. "It's not too bad up here," she said.

Bell, 51, lived in a hotel for several days after the storm, but hotel workers told her to leave last weekend. Rescue workers with a boat took her to the U.S. 90 bridge at South Claiborne, where she made a new place to rest. The National Guard brings her bottled water and food daily, and she sleeps on the raised curb out of the roadway.

In other parts of the city, National Guard troops and police encouraged people to leave. One man was placed in plastic handcuffs and marched from his home in the Garden District to an Oklahoma National Guard bivouac on St. Charles near the Interstate 10 overpass.

The man had no food or water at his home, said Capt. Nate Morgans. He became belligerent when solders talked to him about evacuating, and they took him into custody. Morgans said if he had not been belligerent, the guardsman would not have forced him from his home. If he calmed down he could return to his home, but if he remained aggressive, soldiers would take him to a detention center in the city, Morgans said.

Morgans said his troops were not forcing people to leave, but if they had no food or water, people were urged to evacuate. While many of the remaining residents were trying to decide whether to leave, others were beginning to worry about the fact that little progress seemed to be being made in removing the dead bodies floating around their homes.

Patricia Kelly, 41, sat on a porch in an area of the 9th Ward where floodwaters slowly receded. In the days after levees broke last week, Kelly faced high floodwaters around her home, lost track of much of her family and, she said, watched a dead body floating yards from her house.

Still cut off from communication, she wonders about her family's fate and is haunted by reports that there may be hundreds of bodies in the water.

"I have not heard from my mother or my sister," she said. "I wish someone would start picking up the bodies and figuring out who they are so that people like me can have some peace."

Sgt. Wesley Walker of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has been in New Orleans for more than a week, rescuing people stranded in flooded homes. On Wednesday, he was still searching for the living and coaxing into boats people who do not want to abandon their homes.

"As long as they are being fed, they are going to be able to stay," he said. "We are starting to tell them that, 'If you want water and food, you need to come with us,' " he said.

The holdouts are also being told that soon, as the city empties, there will be few services and little protection for those who insist on staying.